I recently found your great website and submitted a few photos of irises that I have taken. Imagine my surprise when I did a search on Google for those irises looking for a place to purchase them and my images showed up for all to see. I didn't realize that when I put photos on your website that they are available on the internet and there is no copyright protection. What do I do to protect my photos or should I not post them on your website?

In your profile settings, you can add a watermark to your pics.


Also,when you upload a pic you should check to make sure you have reserved your rights to this photo.

Hope this helps.

terrafirma said:In your profile settings, you can add a watermark to your pics.


Also,when you upload a pic you should check to make sure you have reserved your rights to this photo.

Hope this helps.

I did reserve my rights to this photo on NGA but what about the photo showing up on Google - it has no indication that the photo is not free domain?

As far as I understand it photos on the internet are automatically copyright and permission is required for their use unless clearly indicated otherwise. So when people get your pictures on Google results they should go to the site listed for the picture and check if it is available for use elsewhere if they want to publish it somewhere. If you put the watermark on them that will show in Google results as an added protection and make it clear because not everyone realizes they can't just help themselves.

Hi & welcome! Your pics are pretty!

Agree, see the writing at the bottom of the pic of mine shown below. I didn't put that on there, it was automatically done when I uploaded it, according to my uploading settings/preferences on this site, as described above.

It's a pain when people steal our pics ... doubly so if they're using them in adevertising... what's the matter with those people? can't they take their own pics?

try writing to the offenders requesting they take down your photos... also send a note to google.

There's a ton of info (online) about steps we can take when people steal our pictures... But the only sure way to stop it from happening... is to avoid posting anything online that you don't want anyone else to steal.

Sherri, I looked at the 3 images you've uploaded to our database but I do not see a copyright/watermark on them. Perhaps you forgot to click on Save your Changes? Go back to your profile page, click on Change your site preferences. Scroll down the page and click on Yes, add a watermark; choose which type and then scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and click on the green area that says Save your changes.

One thing to note (unless @Dave has changed this since) is that when you change your settings to add a watermark, it only does it for new uploads (it does not apply it to existing uploads).

You might want to ensure you have the watermark option set, request your existing images are deleted and then re-upload them.

I'm wondering if I should change mine so that it also says, 'All rights reserved' or something to that effect. Not that I've seen any of my pictures show up anywhere. Between only having a camera on my iPhone and having glaucoma, I doubt if anyone would use any pictures I take for advertising. Unless they're into squinting. Think I'm just paranoid.

Google pulled the thumbnail of your Iris 'Lou Peach', not the full file. If you look at the single flower pic hard enough, you will see that your "© Sherri Page" is still there, but mostly cut off in the thumbnail. You can see that some writing(or something) is there at the bottom. If you want it to show up in the thumbnail, you will need to position your copyright further up. If you did a watermark through the site here, you will notice that the copyright will show on the thumbnail if the photo is NOT taller than wide.

sooby said:As far as I understand it photos on the internet are automatically copyright and permission is required for their use unless clearly indicated otherwise.

Sooby is correct.

Australis said:One thing to note (unless @Dave has changed this since) is that when you change your settings to add a watermark, it only does it for new uploads (it does not apply it to existing uploads).

You might want to ensure you have the watermark option set, request your existing images are deleted and then re-upload them.

I believe you can just ask Dave to add it to the ones that don't have it.

Well, dang it. And my older brother always tells me that Google is my friend.

Google is a search engine, if you search for an iris, it finds where that name or image is located on the world wide web. You click on the image and it takes you to that website. It does not 'steal' your images.

There's nothing new about stealing plant photos unfortunately. I've had mine appear on Amazon, Ebay, you name it...

I recently found one of my Hoya photos at a website http://worldofsucculents.com/h... with my copyright/watermark cropped out. They do have in small letters at the bottom: "photo from davesgarden.com" but it bothered me that they cropped out my name as owner of the photo. I used their contact link and sent an e-mail asking that they remove my photo from their site or credit me as being the owner and told them to never use my photos without explicit permission but they've never responded and I see that my photo is still up at their site.

I guess it's a chance we all take when putting our images on the internet ...